Pirated Windows 7 is already hit in Indian markets!

In a recent report published on IndiaTimes, I found out that how much piracy is costing companies like Microsoft. According to the news, nearly 50,000 copies of Pirated Windows 7 has been sold in a city like Lucknow. The average price of pirated windows 7 is about Rs.100 ( around 2 dollars), so the total amount is nearly $ 100,000! Now, that much amount of business is of Pirated Windows 7, the actual legal copy’s business will be around $10 Million!

So if city like Lucknow where the IT industry or business industry is small as compared to the metros, is costing nearly $10 million to Microsoft then I’m sure that the number will be way to high when it comes to cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Calcutta, Chennai, Bangalore and so on..

Imagine that if the companies will reduce the price to an extent where people will prefer to use an original copy of the operating system, I’m sure that they’ll be able to make more than double their revenues and will be able to sell more services to those customers – Did someone mention the word SaaS (software as a service)?

Anyway, this situation is not bad till here, it starts to look ugly when you’ll know that most of the computer shop owners sell these pirated windows 7 copies and defend themselves by saying that if these things are available on the internet for free, then why sell original copy. They even say that if I’ll not do it, someone else will do it!

That story is from the shop keepers side, I’m sure most of you’ll not be amazed when I’ll tell you that these shop keepers easily sell the pirated copies to the customers because many of the Indian customers don’t have any idea about computers and they don’t even know that one needs to pay a heavy amount to the companies for buying a legal copy of the operating system. What are your thoughts on the same topic? In our next discussion we’ll talk about making use of Linux and ensuring that you get use the computer and still use a legal copy and that too all for free! Other than that, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of the same. All of this will be discussed from a regular computer user’s point of view.